Katherine Elwes Thomas

If you really want to blow your mind, try to find some of what Katherine Elwes Thomas was smoking.

This book purports to take English nursery rhymes, place them in chronological order, and explain their historical background. The results are, to put it mildly, unique.

The thing is, Thomas seems to think that her historical explanations are factual. She seems so convinced, in fact, that she can't be bothered to document them. Which is perhaps just as well, because if she tried to document them, it would reveal just how ridiculous the whole thing is.

Take as an example (since I don't want to push you to read far) the second item in her chronological list. The rhyme (p. 36) is
The King of France
With twenty thousand men
Marched up the hill,
And then marched down again.

Thomas refers this to Edward the Black Prince and the Battle of Poitiers in 1356!

Now, for starters, this is a variant on "The Noble Duke of York":
The noble Duke of York, He had five thousand men,
And he marched them up to the top of the hill And he marched them down again,
And when they were up, they were up, And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half way up, they were neither up nor down.

That's from the eighteenth century (probably). Now the "King of France" version could be older, though my gut disagrees. But 1356? The English still spoke Middle English then. There are maybe three other pieces of folk poetry which made it from around that time until the nineteenth century when people started to collect them. And this is supposed to be the fourth? And where is the reference to the Black Prince anyway? Or even to a battle?

The term "Mother Goose" first appears in English in 1729, in a translation from Charles Perrault's French fairy tales. Books of Mother Goose rhymes followed. Most other nursery rhymes didn't appear in print until the works of Halliwell in the nineteenth century. Thomas has no evidence that they existed before that, yet Thomas refers them to events of centuries earlier. Hardly ever does the nursery rhyme contain the name of the person Thomas connects it with, or enough details to make a real identification possible. It really does sound like the rantings of someone in the grip of psychosis; it's a great big book with no genuine content at all,

You can take this as fiction, and be amused. You can take it as attempted non-fiction, and pound your head over it (since I have to summarize the craziness in some of the entries, I will admit to finding it very wearying). Just, whatever you do, don't take it seriously.… (mere)